Effective management of land resources is vital to the sustainability of local farming systems in the hills of Nepal and to wider poverty alleviation. In the past many management strategies have been developed and implemented with great success but then do not spread beyond the locality of the initial project. This project aimed to identify sustainable processes for informing policy discussions at national level.

The lack of penetration of these strategies points to a need for library or database of agricultural information that is easily accessible. Of equal importance however is the policy environment. Constraints to the wider uptake of these strategies can exist in the policy frameworks of central and local government and in international and national development organisations. Clearly farmers need incentives in order to change their behaviour and government policies and the way in which they are implemented are key to this process.

This research project, funded by the UK Department for International Development's (DFID) Natural Resources Systems Programme (NRSP) and managed by the University of Reading School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, had the following planned outputs:

Information and knowledge from recent and current land management research which can be applied on a wide scale identified

Constraints to uptake and adaptation of land management strategies, which are amenable to policy intervention, identified and promoted

Sustainable processes for informing policy discussions at national level, within government policy making structures and within organisations that provide support services to rural land users, identified, validated and promoted